In “The Darling,” Anton Chekhov combines a critical narrator with a static, one-dimensional main character to talk about women in 19th-century Russian society. It depicts Olenka as a woman who gains her identity and self-esteem by adopting her current husband's ideas, and it uses a narrator who continually criticizes Olenka for not having thoughts for herself. Chekhov implies that truly interesting women achieve social and intellectual equality with men. The main character of the story, Olenka, however, possesses enough beauty to attract many men, but loses them to fate. Olenka gains her identity and self-esteem by adopting her current husband's ideas. His naive and repetitive cloning of thoughts passes from man to man. Her first husband, Ivan Petrovich or Kukin, was director of the Trivoli open-air theater, and although Olenka looked after the accounts and paid the salaries, she nevertheless remained a victim of his mimic tendencies. “And what Kukin said about the theater and actors, she repeated” (Chekhov 106). Having received an additional opportunity from the author to set out on her own, Olenka marries again, this time to Vassily Andreich Pustovalo, a manager at Babakayev, a timber merchant. Again, she oversaw the accounts and orders, but simply chose to mirror her second husband's behavior. “Her husband’s ideas were her own. If he thought the room was hot or business was slow, she thought the same thing. (107) It seems that in this relationship Olenka sinks deeper into a well of plagiarist thoughts devoid of autonomy. Once again her husband dies and Olenka is left alone, but soon after she meets a married man, Smirnin, a veterinarian... in the middle of a paper... and presents them as stupid and boring. , witless, simple and, worst of all, opinionless. Olenka was beautiful, what an extraordinary beauty to have, with every opportunity to grow as an individual. She comes from an educated family, her husbands gave her the rare freedom to run their businesses, but she chose to do nothing with her talents and simply collect their thoughts. This static character refuses complexity and rejects any opportunity for growth. "The Sweetheart", transformed from a fable into a social statement about the Russian woman of the 1900s. Using narration, Chekov cleverly suggests that woman should be something more, robust and profound. A woman with confidence, self-esteem and intelligence strengthens a woman as her youth fades. It is possible that Chekhov believed that women should be something more than "darling”.